Inquisitive Modal Logic

Modal logic is at the heart of an incredibly fruitful interdisciplinary enterprise: it is used to formalize reasoning about key notions like knowledge and belief, obligation and permission, action and outcome, and finds important applications in computer science, AI, economics, and linguistics. In its current form, modal logic builds on truth-conditional semantics, which analyzes meaning in terms of truth conditions. This is the source of two limitations. First, there are important modal notions whose argument is not a proposition, but a question. Since questions do not have truth conditions, these notions cannot be analyzed in existing modal logics. Second, much recent work indicates that natural language modals are sensitive not only to the truth conditions of their argument, but also to the different ""alternatives"" it presents, thus making distinctions that are invisible to truth-conditional semantics. The aim of this project is to develop a new framework for modal logic that overcomes these limitations